RaptorCon 26: Tech Forward Insurance and Risk Management (Jason Kaminsky, CEO kWh Analytics)

Jason Kaminsky, CEO of kWh Analytics, delivers a crash course on how property insurance actually works for solar and storage assets. Drawing on kWh Analytics' position as a renewables-focused carrier, Jason walks through the structure of the market, why coverage shifted from cheap and plentiful to a hardened market after the 2019 Midway hail loss, and how attritional and natural catastrophe risks are evaluated today. He outlines what underwriters actually look for and where the industry remains early in differentiating risk based on best practices.

His three calls to action for IPPs and asset owners: be a good steward of your assets, engage insurers earlier in the development process, and document what you are doing so it can be communicated through the broker chain. In the absence of information, underwriters assume average or below.

Jason is then joined by Dave Martin, Manager of Business Operations at Lightsource bp, who moderates a Q&A on the practical realities asset owners face. Topics include how much pricing is locked in at design versus operations, the temporal mismatch between one-year insurance bets and 30-year asset bets, concentration risk in markets like Texas, the importance of structured data sharing between owners and insurers, and the role of brokers and wholesale brokers in getting to the right outcome.